Multicultural Children’s Book Day – The Place Where You Live

It is time to share another wonderfully written children’s book: El lugar donde vives/The Place Where You Live. Written in small 3-line verses (with the exception of the very last one) and with a recurring ending line “here is the place where you live/aquí el lugar donde vives”, James Luna takes readers through many different parts of his community. From his house where grandma serves hot chocolate and tortillas, the local candy store full of paletas y chicles, the library stocked with magical books, the park, to the cart where snow cones and elotes are sold.

The illustrations are colorful and really captivate the essence of the writing. My favorite are the illustrations for the library and the park. Children as little as 3 (even younger) can really enjoy this book – it makes a magnificent bedtime story.

As a classroom teacher, I have also shared this book with my dual-language students who are learning to play with words during out poetry unit. Children tend to be intimidated by poetry, but using this book (together with many other books written in Spanish) has helped many of my reluctant writers. This book is definitely a great addition to your home or classroom library.

Our mission is to not only raise awareness for the kid’s books that celebrate diversity, but to get more of these of books into classrooms and libraries.

1. Our Mission: The MCCBD team’s mission to spread the word and raise awareness about the importance of diversity in children’s literature. Our young readers need to see themselves within the pages of a book and experience other cultures, languages, traditions and religions within the pages of a book. We encourage readers, parents, teachers, caregivers and librarians to follow along the fun book reviews, author visits, event details, a multicultural children’s book linky and via our hashtag (#ReadYourWorld) on Twitter and other social media.
NOTE: The full name of this event is Multicultural Children’s Book Day and our official hashtag is #ReadYourWorld.
The co-creators of this unique event are Mia Wenjen from Pragmatic Mom and Valarie Budayr from Jump Into a Book/Audrey Press. You can find a bio for Mia and Valarie here.

3. Multicultural Children’s Book Day has 12 amazing Co-Host and you can us the links below or view them here. All Done Monkey, Crafty Moms Share, Educators Spin on it, Growing Book by Book, Imagination Soup, I’m Not the Nanny, InCultural Parent, Kid World Citizen, Mama Smiles, Multicultural Kid Blogs, Spanish Playground

4. Classroom Reading Challenge: Help spread the word on our Classroom Reading Challenge. This very special offering from MCCBD offers teachers and classrooms the chance to (very easily) earn a free hardcover multicultural children’s book for their classroom library. These books are not only donated by the Junior Library Guild, but they are pre-screened and approved by them as well. What we could really use some help with is spreading the word to your teacher/librarian/classroom connections so we can get them involved in this program. There is no cost to teachers and classrooms and we’ve made the whole
process as simple as possible. You can help by tweeting the below info: